Projecting an Image Onto Water

24 Aug 2026 Experimental Music

Turning a Plough Into an Instrument

Indonesian experimental duo Senyawa have always blurred the distinction between instrument building and composition. For Vajranala, Wukir Suryadi took the form of a traditional Indonesian plough, the luku, and transformed it into a large bowed instrument. A smaller version was constructed for the recording sessions.

The album connects this instrument with mythology surrounding Pawon Temple in Central Java, natural cycles and ideas about how knowledge becomes power. The project extended beyond recorded sound into a physical monument built from thousands of carved red bricks and andesite stones.

What interests me most is the plough. An agricultural tool already contains rhythm: repetition, resistance, movement through material. Converting its form into an instrument does not simply create an exotic sound source. It shifts an object from producing lines in soil to producing vibrations in air.

That feels close to the best experimental music. The experiment is not merely a strange effect added after composition. It begins by questioning what an instrument can be in the first place.

https://senyawaofficial.bandcamp.com/album/vajranala

#Senyawa #ExperimentalMusic #Indonesia #InstrumentDesign

Turning a Plough Into an Instrument Senyawa (Official) Vajranala, by Senyawa 6 track album

23 Aug 2026 Ethio Jazz

Jazz With Another Set of Scales

Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz was not created by simply placing Ethiopian melodies over American jazz. His musical path moved through Ethiopia, Wales, London and New York before returning to Addis Ababa. Strut’s retrospective of his 1965–1975 recordings describes how he gradually searched for a balance in which Ethiopian modes could retain their identity inside arrangements informed by jazz.

That word, balance, seems important. Fusion can easily become a situation where one language dominates and the other becomes decoration. In Mulatu’s music the harmonic and rhythmic centre does not always behave in the way a Western jazz listener expects. Vibraphone, horns, keyboards and percussion can sound familiar individually, yet the relationships between them shift the entire musical perspective.

It reminds me that originality does not necessarily require inventing a new instrument or technology. Sometimes it comes from hearing that two existing musical systems do not have to meet in the obvious place.

The interesting territory is often somewhere between them.

Mulatu Astatke 'New York – Addis – London The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965-1975'

#MulatuAstatke #EthioJazz #EthiopianMusic #Jazz

Jazz With Another Set of Scales strutrecords Mulatu Astatke 'New York - Addis - London The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965 Vibraphone and keyboard player, master arranger and bandleader, Mulatu Astatke is one of the all-time greats of Ethiopian music and the creator of his own original music form, Ethio jazz. Through the acclaimed Ethiopiques album series and through featuring on the soundtrack to the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers, his

23 Aug 2026 Breathing Nils Frahm’s Felt

When the Piano Starts Breathing

Nils Frahm’s Felt began with a practical problem: how do you play a piano late at night without disturbing your neighbours? He damped the instrument with thick felt and played extremely softly. Then he pushed the microphones deep inside the piano, close enough to capture sounds that recording engineers often try to remove. His breathing, the movement of the piano action and creaking floorboards became almost as audible as the notes.

That accident is what interests me. We spend enormous amounts of time in studios trying to separate the intended sound from everything around it. Felt does almost the reverse. The mechanism, performer and room are allowed into the composition.

It changes the scale of listening. Instead of making the piano larger, Frahm makes us move closer. A key being pressed becomes a physical event. Silence is no longer empty because you begin hearing everything that usually hides between the notes.

Sometimes intimacy in a recording has less to do with reverb or microphone quality than with deciding which imperfections deserve to remain.

https://www.erasedtapes.com/releases/eratp033-nils-frahm-felt

#NilsFrahm #Felt #PianoRecording #MusicProduction

When the Piano Starts Breathing Erased Tapes Felt by Nils Frahm · Releases · Erased Tapes Berlin-based pianist Nils Frahm is already a firebrand in the music world, collaborating with contemporaries such as Peter Broderick, Ólafur Arnalds and…

23 Aug 2026 All the

Eighteen Musicians Breathing as One Machine

Steve Reich completed Music for 18 Musicians in 1976. The ensemble is unusual: four pianos, three marimbas, two xylophones, vibraphone, violin, cello, clarinets and four female voices. Reich noted that although the steady pulse connects the piece to his earlier work, its harmony, instrumentation and structure represented something new. All the sound is acoustic, with microphones used only for amplification.

What fascinates me is how mechanical the music can seem without actually being mechanical. Patterns repeat with extraordinary precision, yet changes are passed through human cues, breath and attention. Voices and clarinets have to breathe. Percussionists physically repeat figures. Small harmonic shifts gradually alter what the listener notices inside the pulse.

Minimalism is sometimes described as music where very little happens. Music for 18 Musicians makes me hear the opposite. So much happens that the changes can become almost microscopic. Repetition magnifies difference.

A machine could reproduce a loop perfectly. Eighteen musicians make the loop interesting because perfect repetition is never quite possible.

https://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Steve-Reich-Music-for-18-Musicians/548

#SteveReich #Minimalism #ContemporaryMusic #MusicFor18Musicians

Eighteen Musicians Breathing as One Machine boosey.com Boosey & Hawkes Composers and their Music Welcome to the world’s leading classical music publisher, formed from two historic companies and shaping the music of the future.

23 Aug 2026 Art That Exists

Art That Exists by Disappearing

Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s online project Vanishing Acts runs through the end of 2026 as part of TFAM Net.Open. The title immediately raises an interesting problem for digital culture: what does disappearance mean when technology is supposed to make copying effortless?

Digital material appears infinitely reproducible, yet it can be surprisingly fragile. Servers close, software becomes incompatible, platforms disappear and links that once connected entire projects eventually return errors. A physical painting can decay, but its deterioration is visible. A digital artwork may remain theoretically perfect until the infrastructure required to experience it simply stops working.

That makes preservation a strange artistic question. Keeping a digital file is not necessarily enough. Sometimes you must preserve software, hardware, network behaviour, instructions or even an obsolete operating environment.

The internet encourages us to think that everything remains available somewhere. Digital art quietly demonstrates the opposite. An artwork can disappear without leaving an empty space on the wall.

https://www.tfam.museum/

#DigitalArt #TaiwanArt #NetArt #MediaArt

Art That Exists by Disappearing Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s online project Vanishing Acts runs through the end of 2026 as part of TFAM Net.Open. The title immediately raises an interesting…

23 Aug 2026 Belmore’s Fountain

Projecting an Image Onto Water

Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain, created for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale, does something deceptively simple with video: the image is projected onto falling water rather than a conventional screen. The work moves between fire, water and blood, placing elemental imagery against an industrial North American landscape.

The physical projection surface changes everything for me. A normal screen is designed to disappear so that we concentrate on the image. Falling water refuses to disappear. It moves, breaks the projected light and reminds us that the image has a body. The medium becomes visible precisely because it cannot hold the picture perfectly still.

Belmore, an Anishinaabe artist, has repeatedly worked with land, bodies, political histories and the material presence of water. In Fountain, water is simultaneously subject, projection surface and moving sculpture. The video cannot be separated cleanly from the substance carrying it.

Digital images often feel weightless. Here light needs something unstable and physical before we can see it.

Fountain

#RebeccaBelmore #VideoArt #IndigenousArt #InstallationArt

Projecting an Image Onto Water Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain, created for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale, does something deceptively simple with video: the image is proje…

23 Aug 2026 Chen Chieh Jen

Returning Workers to an Empty Factory

Chen Chieh-Jen made Factory in 2003 after meeting former workers from Taiwan’s Lien Fu garment factory, which had closed in 1996 without paying workers compensation and pension claims. The women had spent years protesting. Chen invited them back into the abandoned workplace and filmed them quietly performing the labour they once carried out there.

The resulting work is deliberately slow and silent. Images of the women inside the empty factory are combined with archival propaganda footage presenting Taiwan’s earlier manufacturing prosperity. That collision interests me because nothing needs to be explained through dramatic narration. The same industrial history looks completely different depending on whether it is told through economic success or through the bodies left behind when production moves elsewhere.

Re-enacting work inside a factory that no longer employs anyone turns labour into something almost ghostlike. The machines, gestures and building still remember a system that has already abandoned them. Silence does not make the political argument weaker. It gives the workers’ presence more weight.

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#ChenChiehJen #TaiwaneseArt #VideoArt #LabourHistory

Returning Workers to an Empty Factory Chen Chieh-Jen made Factory in 2003 after meeting former workers from Taiwan’s Lien Fu garment factory, which had closed in 1996 without paying workers com…

23 Aug 2026 Ciurlionis

When Painting Starts Thinking Like Music

Mikalojus Konstantinas ?iurlionis is difficult to place neatly inside one discipline because he worked simultaneously as a painter and composer. During a creative period of only about seven years, he produced more than 300 paintings, hundreds of graphic works and sketches, and around 400 musical compositions. His museum in Kaunas preserves most of that legacy.

The connection between the two practices was not merely biographical. ?iurlionis explored how principles associated with music could operate visually, and some of his best-known painting cycles even use musical terms such as Sonata, Fugue and Prelude. His landscapes and imagined spaces often avoid ordinary perspective, moving instead toward layered, rhythmic and almost cosmic structures.

What interests me is that translating music into painting does not require illustrating sound waves or musical instruments. Rhythm can become repetition of shapes. A motif can return like a theme. Visual space can develop tension and release. ?iurlionis shows that the connection between sound and image may exist deepest at the level of structure.

https://ciurlionis.lt/activity/branches/m-k-ciurlionis-national-museum-of-art/expositions/m-k-ciurlionio-kuryba-en/

#Ciurlionis #LithuanianArt #PaintingAndMusic #Symbolism

When Painting Starts Thinking Like Music ciurlionis.lt M. K. ?iurlionis’ Creation The exhibition showcases not only ?iurlionis’ paintings but also his multifaceted creative legacy – music, graphic art, and photography. The artworks are revealed in a new, modern light – the same lighting technology used to preserve masterpieces by Italy’s greatest artists. Visitors can pause and immerse themselves in the ?iurlionis atmosphere while resting in chairs upholstered with Japanese vegan leather. M. K. ?iurlionis – a composer and painter who also explored literature and photography – created over 300 paintings, more than 700 graphic works and sketches, and around 400 musical compositions during his remarkably short yet prolific 7-year creative period. Nearly all of these works are preserved in this museum. His paintings are notable for a uniquely poetic perception of space, often evoking a bird’s-eye view. They carry a cosmic perspective and a sense of deep inner contemplation. ?iurlionis was drawn to questions about the origins and structure of the universe, the spiritual forces that govern the world, nature and its cycles, the meaning of human life, psychological states, the evolution of being, and the possibility of applying musical principles to visual art. Music filled ?iurlionis’ life in countless forms. He composed distinctive original works, harmonized folk songs, led choirs, gave concerts, and published articles on music and culture. His graphic art and sketches offer valuable insight into his creative thought process and the recurring motifs that sparked his imagination. His ink compositions are particularly striking for their virtuoso, jewel-like technique, diverse strokes, and intricate ornamentation. ?iurlionis was a curious and wide-ranging thinker, deeply interested in philosophy, theosophy, cosmology, religions and myths, as well as the latest scientific and technological innovations of his time. It’s no surprise that he also picked up a camera – the photos he took during the summer of 1905 in the Caucasus capture intimate moments of that journey.

23 Aug 2026 Album Becomes

When an Album Becomes an Instrument

With Biophilia, Björk treated an album as something that could be entered, touched and changed. Released in 2011, the project connected ten songs to interactive apps exploring relationships between musical structures and natural phenomena. The live version pushed that idea into physical space with custom instruments: pendulum harps used gravity to pluck strings, Tesla coils produced pitched electrical arcs, and a modified celeste incorporated bronze gamelan bars. The project also included educational workshops rather than limiting itself to concerts.

What interests me is how Biophilia refuses to decide where the music actually lives. Is it in the recording, the app, the instrument, the physical force producing the sound, or the listener interacting with it? Most albums arrive as finished objects. Here the musical idea becomes a system that can be explored from several directions. Technology is not simply used to decorate the music. It becomes a way of making musical structure visible and playable.

https://www.snibbe.com/apps/biophilia

#Bjork #Biophilia #InteractiveMusic #MusicTechnology

When an Album Becomes an Instrument Scott Snibbe BJÖRK: BIOPHILIA — Scott Snibbe - Interactive Art Biophilia by Björk is the world’s first app album: a multimedia exploration of music, nature and technology.

23 Aug 2026 Ignore Pacita Abad’s Flight

A Painting Too Large to Ignore

Pacita Abad’s Flight to Freedom grew from her encounters with Cambodian refugees near the Thai border around the period of the Cambodian-Vietnamese conflict. The monumental painting shows a mass of displaced people moving across the landscape, turning migration into something physically difficult to overlook. National Gallery Singapore describes it as one of Abad’s significant social realist works and notes that the Cambodian Refugees series developed from situations she witnessed directly.

Abad later became especially known for colourful stitched and stuffed trapunto paintings, but this earlier work shows another side of her practice. What stays with me is the scale. News photographs of refugees are often consumed quickly, one image among thousands. A painting several metres wide changes that relationship. You cannot absorb the crowd in a glance. Individual figures become part of a collective movement while still resisting disappearance into statistics. Scale becomes an ethical decision about how long an image asks us to look.

https://www.nationalgallery.sg/sg/en/learn-about-art/art-conservation.html

#PacitaAbad #PhilippineArt #SocialRealism #SoutheastAsianArt

A Painting Too Large to Ignore National Gallery Singapore Art Conservation | National Gallery Singapore At National Gallery Singapore, art conservation is more than a practice — it’s a commitment to preserving our cultural treasures for future generations.

23 Aug 2026 Barkcloth

Painting With the Bark of a Tree

Samoan siapo begins long before any pattern appears. Makers use the inner bark of the u’a, or paper mulberry tree, scraping and pounding it until thin strips expand into cloth. Separate pieces can then be joined into larger surfaces. Decoration may be drawn freehand or transferred by rubbing the cloth across a relief board called an upeti. Traditional colours can come from soot, tree bark, turmeric, plant seeds and other natural sources. Siapo is still exchanged at ceremonies, weddings and funerals.

I like how difficult it is to separate image from material here. The surface is not a neutral support waiting for an artist to begin. Growing, harvesting, pounding, joining and dye-making are already part of what the finished pattern contains. Even the repeated motifs often refer back to plants and animals. In digital work we can choose a colour with one click and forget where colour comes from. Siapo makes the opposite visible: an image can begin in a tree, an earth pigment and hours of physical preparation before the first deliberate mark appears.

https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/84881

#Siapo #SamoanArt #Barkcloth #PacificArt

Painting With the Bark of a Tree collections.tepapa.govt.nz Siapo (tapa cloth) Find out more about Siapo (tapa cloth) at Collections Online - Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa